End of story. Performance tuning and building an awesome server are cool, but this is the bottom line: our data is sacred. Before anything else, you have to make regular backups and you have to make certain that those backups work properly. If you want to know why, read this sad story: CouchSurfing Deletes Itself, Shuts Down."

It's not only the importance of backups, it's the ability to recover from them - I can tell at least a handful of stories were a backup was available (or thought was available) but one was not able to recover.

There's nothing better than stories like these to point out were a dba's priorities should be.